Explore Geographical Relationhips in Avalara AvaTax Data with Power Map

The CData ODBC Driver for AvalaraAvatax is easy to set up and use with self-service analytics solutions like Power BI: Microsoft Excel provides built-in support for the ODBC standard. This article shows how to load the current Avalara AvaTax data into Excel and start generating location-based insights on Avalara AvaTax data in Power Map.

Create an ODBC Data Source for AvalaraAvatax

To connect to Avalara AvaTax data, your application will use connection properties defined in the data source name (DSN).

Below is a typical connection string:

User=MyUser;Password=MyPassword;

You can configure the DSN in the built-in Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator. This is the last step of the driver installation. See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for a guide to use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure a DSN for Avalara AvaTax data.

Import Avalara AvaTax Data into Excel

You can import data into Power Map either from an Excel spreadsheet or from Power Pivot. For a step-by-step guide to use either method to import Avalara AvaTax data, see the "Using the ODBC Driver" section in the help documentation.

Geocode Avalara AvaTax Data

After importing the Avalara AvaTax data into an Excel spreadsheet or into PowerPivot, you can drag and drop Avalara AvaTax entities in Power Map. To open Power Map, click any cell in the spreadsheet and click Insert -> Map.

In the Choose Geography menu, Power Map detects the columns that have geographic information. In the Geography and Map Level menu in the Layer Pane, you can select the columns you want to work with. Power Map then plots the data. A dot represents a record that has this value. When you have selected the geographic columns you want, click Next.

Select Measures and Categories

You can then simply select columns: Measures and categories are automatically detected. The available chart types are Stacked Column, Clustered Column, Bubble, Heat Map, and Region.